Let’s consolidate potential Autonomi competitors into a single topic.
The goal is to know the decentralized network landscape and identify how advantages of competing projects could be added to Autonomi.
Also note the topic on how Autonomi differs from other technology which discusses some of these.
Siacoin, Filecoin, and StorJ are a few others
IPFS & Filecoin
IPFS: A protocol and peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system. It doesn’t have a native incentive layer — nodes share files voluntarily.
Filecoin: A separate project by Protocol Labs, designed to incentivize storage on IPFS-like infrastructure using a blockchain and FIL token. Filecoin provides verifiable, paid storage with decentralized contracts and proofs.
So Filecoin is not “just” the token — it’s a decentralized storage network that builds on IPFS tech but adds:
Storage and retrieval markets
Cryptographic proofs (Proof-of-Replication, Proof-of-Spacetime)
Smart contracts for data storage
Siacoin (Sia)
Sia is a fully decentralized cloud storage platform.
It uses smart contracts and Siacoin (SC) as the native currency to pay hosts for storage.
The network is permissionless — anyone can become a host or renter.
It’s a working decentralized network, not just a token. The token is part of how it operates.
Storj
Storj is also a decentralized storage network, where users rent out unused disk space.
It uses encryption, erasure coding, and distribution to split and store data across many nodes.
Storj pays hosts in the STORJ token, but the underlying system is a real decentralized P2P network.
It’s centralized in governance to a degree (run by Storj Labs), but decentralized in storage.
Check out the Dev Forum
Veilid got mentioned the other day by @Herodotos I think ??
Here’s their launch slides.
Many common goals…
Their Discord is at Veilid Community
Looks very interesting… maybe Autonomi could fit into their offering as ‘blockstore’ their terminology?
Their ‘blockstore’ says coming soon, but it’ll be bittorrent like apparently, so Autonomi could add value there with its permanence.
They mention needing a token to use a service disparagingly though, so they may not be open to utilising something like Autonomi, and will never compete with Autonomi’s core offering if a market for resources is something they’d avoid.
Would be interested to hear what some developers think of their offering. Maybe opportunity for collaboration?
https://www.icn.global/ looks like an interesting competitor.
It’s even called the ‘Impossible Cloud Network’… definitely some striking similarities to Autonomi (which ‘the impossible network’ has been used to describe in the past).
Given the issues we’ve seen recently, where the production network is not working well, but Alpha net is (according to reports from devs), I wonder if a core network of higher spec, tightly managed hardware as a backbone for the network would be preferable, with nodes-for-all either coming later, or providing backups & other high-latency-tolerant functions.
Hopefully Autonomi will be able to compete with sufficient performance with some optimisations.
Although I do think the ambition to allow nodes of any sort to contribute to the network is good, it was a mistake to make it an early goal. You’re exactly right that the focus should be on a solid functional and performant network first, and then later attempt to expand support for all nodes.
Yeah. I love the vision for Autonomi’s organic network approach vs top-down heavily structured alternatives (like ICN - seems like a very different beast looking at the docs briefly).
But delivering snappy performance does seem to be challenging for Autonomi. I wonder if some other approach may be needed to deliver low-latency stuff on top of what nodes have shown to do well (store data reliably, fast downloading of big files etc).
Hopefully that won’t be necessary, but it’s been some months since launch, and the best experience I’ve had has been Atlas, which took about 1 minute to load. Let’s see how things go with the planned developments from the team this month, and innovations like ‘tarchive’ etc for optimising website downloads.